Stephen Barber The Raw Gesture of Europe

The human body in Europe exists between the visual and the visceral. Images created by that body project and intensify its desires, eruptions, depressions, activations, impulsions. The body is sustained through images that incise, and by experiences in dark places (nightclubs, cinemas, city streets at night), by self-immersions and self-glorications, killings of the self and resuscitations. The body is in a state of catastrophe. It must be courageous to survive, refusing the suffocating precariousness of its existence while embracing the unknown upheavals and bliss of its obliteration. What it can leave, of its presence in the world, is a barrier of scars against that world, against envelopment and obliteration: its own scars of images. Scars are the traces of life on the body: they are the mark of self-directed, wild gesture: the bodys images project them out. They last only for a short moment, and have to be gripped, grasped, kissedat, sucked-at. The scar is also innite, created to be deepened indenitely by pain or joy or despair, saturated with sensation to bursting point, and kept in against the world of Europe and its invasive media screen, as a carapace. This carapace is developed by layers and sweeps, collisions and ricochets of corporeal fragments. The strength of the bodys own scars of images emerges from the bodys refusal to be engulfed into the media screen of Europe. This refusal is a work of gesture. Nothing is more abstract than the body. The body in Europe needs its bones back: its shoulderblades and vertebrae, ribcage and elbows, heels, kneecaps. The work of rhythmic reconstruction, to pound together the bodys own scars of images, from exposed components 466

and skeletal fragments, is a ferocious process of gesture. The gesture is the directed trajectory of the body, that gives the body back to the body. Gesture is in constant danger of being lost, and the body separated from the body. Gesture must be immediate, to adhere self to body, the body to its own image, with intentional immediacy. Gesture seizes the face, arranges its components by violence, refuses the collapse of the body into the homogenizing, overwhelming media screen of Europe. It is gesture that refuses representation and propels the body as a mass of movements, corporeal architectures, all compacted into one another. Gesture is the slightest thing. It has no substance in itself: it is in ight through uid space, open to incidents, interruptions and accidents, until it can aggressively hit the media screen of Europe and burn the image of the body in, ripping and decimating that screen. The person who is creating their own action of Europe becomes exhausted by the exertion involved in the work, starts to hallucinate. The hallucinations are provoked to grind their way into images of the body, transforming instantly, formation to formation, obsession to obsession. The work of transformation itself is a grand hallucination that transports the body into a torrent of identity. The sensation of identity is hallucinated into a thousand metamorphoses, from the sexual angel to the murderous monster. The body is itself a hallucination: the head is the site of gross transmutation: magnied, obscured, revealed, sensationalized, obsessed, ignited. The body believes it must compulsively project its own voids and scars, and hallucination makes images spill and swarm over the body, abundantly. The body hallucinating must give the hallucination life and breath, but has to control its hyperventilation, so that the image of the body gesturing out its wild hallucinations is experi-

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enced as lucid. The vital hallucination is so lucid that it exhausts its own maker, generating and proliferating new hallucinations a strange and multiple world of the hallucinating body in tension with the abject media screen of Europe. The body is impelled by a voracious visual transmission, carried and discharged by the hallucination. The hallucination lives in and as the body. The border between image and body is the ultimate infuriation, the site of an intimate abrasion, ecstasy, extremity. The human bodys substance hits and grates against itself when it creates an image of the body. The repercussions of this process are explosive, in, on, and from the body. The body has a hidden face, stubborn and magisterial, which struggles against all appropriation. Only the rawest gesture will dispel the media screen of Europe, and that is the gesture which the body must use to assault that homogenizing screen. The body is slippery, elusive material an illusion which can kick and punch back at the presence of the invasive and appropriating media screen that surrounds it. That screen is something immediately denied and refused by the corporeal, to the most extreme point, in Europe, to start with. The refusal of the media is the rst word of the body, in Europe. The body in Europe is an arrangement in movement. The movements are innite in dimension, intention and duration. Even the bodys static position in the city is the constellation of a thousand movements, some harsh, some tender. The bodys own image is a gestural face-toface with the corporeal: an amalgam of gesture, body against body and bone against bone. The eye suffers a painful transformation, born of the necessity to give life to vision, while gripping the physical material itself through vision: through the eyes retina, the eyelid, the

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eyelash: closing, averting, confronting. The gesture sweeps the eye, grinding out accidents and intentions in an ocular lash: creating the nal ocular crash. One eye is blinded, the other eye is exploded. One eye digs into itself, to provoke incursive visions into the very matter of the image, the other eye bursts out upon the city, forcibly dragging the body in which it is embedded along with it. The bodys images are created at the axis of a dangerous collision of corporeal elements. The body moves to make immediate actions and connections, moves to create. The body is in a state of isolation, to be broken only by an effusive sexuality a lust which overturns, interrogates, a yearning which dissolves corporeal borders with abrupt force. The body must shatter everything in its way to proceed to a sexuality which burns from visceral gestures. Any hesitation, and it will be submerged into the pacifying media screen of Europe. The body acts alone, in solitude, unless it is a torrent of sex: it is the instrument of its own isolation. At rst, it refuses desire, and concentrates on a silent, visual projection of its own presence. The body is exposed to the extremes of Europe, to the most exhaustive degree, irresistibly becoming part of a sequence of violent corporeal amalgams. The transformation of the body from isolation to amalgamation is a process of upheaval, to be executed by the most dense and demanding gestures, in Europe. The bodys image transmits this process: the image is a raw instrument of welding, soldering, synthesizing body to body: so the mouth must scream, the limbs must ache in ecstasy, the lips must swell, the spine must tense, everything must work to make the bodys image show surface enter, and become, ignited interior. Gesture conspires in the body to refuse assimilation to the media screen of Europe. When the body is captured 469

by that screen, it must ferociously refuse and repel its nullifying incorporation with an equivalent effort to that involved in the desire to be and present visual attitude. The body in stasis is glacial in its resistance to the screen which surrounds it and tries to x it. The body is in ecstasy at and as itself: it holds a designed, determined craving for inertia. At every void moment, the body is satised to be in stasis. The body is nothing, and magisterially aware of that nothing. Gesture is the tangible violence articulating the body, bringing together the driving currents and pulses of movement which project the body as a silence, as a terminal incoherence, as a total inertia. Gesture demonstrates visibility: the body creates for itself a void presence. Its attitude must be unbroken, for the sake of a void survival, in Europe. The body has a city to live in. It draws the city around itself and animates it. It is in the arena of the city that the body breaks its stasis and moves. The city lives only from the bodys tension and friction. Otherwise, it is a raw envelopment. In Europe, all media elements corrode the body, holding it xed while the body must move, between overowing tenements, clattering underground trains, psychotic pavements. The body is enervated by the city, and images of the body proliferate around its brutal exhilaration. The night sky over the city breathes. The bodys city is dense, concentrated down to an axis of nightclubs, cinemas, peripheral streets. Noise accumulates around the body, made only for the body, and the body gestures to ingurgitate or expel noise that it wants or rejects. The body walks the streets, generating obsession, enchanted by terror. The city holds the most intense, deep blackness: its buildings have the darkest dirt as their essential substance they have been attacked, destroyed, pulverized, but they still stand together wounded, as a city. The wounds of the city hurt the body too. The blackness intensies the light 470

that spills from the heart of the citys hell: one million illuminated signs, and the sudden emanation from the skin of dancing bodies, saddened eyes. The city is a war of bodies. At one moment, the body will be dancing, expansive and uid. The next moment, the body is in despair, curtailed, in a crippled zigzag with its hands over its face. The city precipitates this sudden shift of sensation. The city has a disequilibrium which is brought to bear when the body is in such joy that it exposes its nerves, its capacity to survive, to the crushing power of the city. The body is disturbed: as it breaks a border and is lost, the sky collapses, the ground gives way, the tenements fall in on themselves. Without a city, the body cannot construct a survival: but with a city, survival is immediately cut through. The sky ashes virulent red and gold. And the bodys raw gesture against and of Europe does not comfort the despairing body: it sets it into acute upheaval, so that the body is in maximum confrontation with itself, splintering bone to bone. This is the vital moment of the body: it may then obliterate all of its own sources and borders, and create a new body, and a new image of the body. The interstices between the bodys sensational extremes are marked by the tracks of the strongest, wildest gestures. At the moment before gesture, the body is in a state of dangerous anticipation and turbulence. The transformation is imminent: as in death, the body will undergo a cataclysm beyond its imagining. It will be astonished by its act. The moment before death or gesture is a terminal extremity. The gesture is ready to strike: immediately, the image of this gesture will be spat out, and compulsively nailed into and against the media screen of Europe. But the bodys gesture will then burn out. The most creative moment is suddenly the most 471

void moment, for gesture. The image is created, the body is exhausted, the gesture is lost. Gesture becomes dispersed forever in the endless night sky of Europe. Gesture cannot be interrogated, but its impacts can be excavated and given new esh. Gesture is the volatile interzone between the body and the image in Europe. Gesture is a strange, frantic, physical, visual wilderness, overloaded with borders and extremes, collapses and desires: it seizes the body and the image, powered by obsession. And obsession: does obsession have a matter, an intention, does obsession always seal itself to the city? In the city of obsession, the most vital work that can be done is to collect obsessions around the body. And concurrently, bodies must be collected around a creative work of obsession. The greatest obsession is the body. This raw obsession collides with an obsessive sophistication, in the work of generating images of the body. Obsession itself is raw an obsession with the raw and incomplete, which is rendered rawly. In the obsession of Europe, obsession is a matter of proliferation, density and emanation. The obsession is what emanates from the body, what spurts out. A surrounding obsession explores the enclosure of the night around bodies, and the vivid bursting of the night by the body. Obsessionality is all-consuming, allinclusive, all-embracing. The substance of obsession, in Europe, is the fragmentation of obsession, so that new obsessions pour forth. It is a breaking which creates obsession, resuscitates obsession. Obsession, in Europe, is the desire to complete what is irreparably cut: and then to cut again. 472